MAKING (NEW) MUSIC

Two music-related posts from recent days.

The first, from Morph, takes on the recording industry for taking credit for a boom in legal downloads of music from the Internet:

So legal downloads are up, tripled in fact, over the past year.

Lobbyists for the record industry have had a field day touting their battle against file-sharers as the reason paid downloads have finally started to make a return.

~snip~

Online music sales have come of age in the past year. As paid downloads have tripled, so have the number of online-music sellers, up from 100 last year to around 300 now, and especially, Apple’s triumphant run from iTunes shop to iTunes software to everyone’s favourite Christmas present last year, the iPod.

That was my first reaction to the news, too. It wasn’t the RIAA suing everything in pants (or shorts, skorts or skirts) that pushed up sales, it was the fact that it is suddenly easy to do and cheap. And that’s largely down to Apple and not the recording industry. The iPod presented the platform; Apple set the price (99 cents a track and a whole CD for under 10 bucks) and provided the mechanism for delivery. There are other services, of course, but not for us Mac users and not with the success that Apple has enjoyed.

I’m not sure it can be empirically proven, but I strongly suspect the facts that it’s easy to buy music online (too easy in my case), songs are cheap and, with wider adoption of broadband, delivery is almost instant, are what’s driving the increase.

The second item shows what can be done with online music delivery and, again, the innovation isn’t coming from the recording industry. This weekend nouveau flamenco star Ottmar Liebert went live with this Listening Lounge, an online music story with some unique additions. Among the innovations: music is released under a Creative Commons licence that allows sampling and remixing, you can browse music by tags (you have to see it to truly appreciate it), and a podcast from the site delivers free music to your favourite player. When you click on the “Listen” button, you get to listen to the full song and not just a 30-second clip. For musicians, there are a couple of great features: the site sells cheap, copyright-free loops, and it sells parts of songs: the rhythm guitar tracks or bass track for the song Alhambra are currently being offered for $1 each, under a CC Sampling Plus licence.

Right now the selection of albums and artists is small, but Leibert promises that more will soon be added. He writes:

A small step for humanity, but a big step for SSRI towards independence from the old distribution system. It may take years for everyone to get comfortable with buying music this way, and I expect to be selling CDs (at least at concerts) for quite a while, but this is the right choice because:

– The LL enables us to offer music that might not be commercially viable on CD, e.g. the live tracks, the loops, works in progress etc…

– The Net is international and people in Singapore and Australia will be able to buy and download CD quality music from us!

This really is an amazing site, and obviously the product of someone who has thought long and hard about distributing music in a way that gives fans a range of choices and an enjoyable experience. In short, it treats those who visit as music lovers, not consumers, And, again, this is not the product of music industry thinking.

The music industry, in fact, is giving us copy protected CDs that won’t play on some devices, limited access to its catalogues and other restrictions on what and where we can play, while innovations in legally delivering music to a hungry market come from outside. It’s not only wrong for the industry to claim credit for the rapid growth in legal downloads, it’s hypocritical.

TAGS: ONLINE MUSIC, DOWNLOADS, OTTMAR LIEBERT